Clean vs. Modern Sidebar Layout | ClickUp Collaboration Troubleshooting

So this morning I was collaborating with a team member who's new to the team. She's new to ClickUp, and I was introducing her to our ClickUp universe. And I was saying, well, go on to the left side, look for this symbol and go here for that. And she was so confused. And I was sitting there thinking, wait, why is this that hard? The icon's right there. Lo and behold, even in my knowledge of ClickUp, I just didn't even remember the fact that there are actually two styles, two layouts of ClickUp. I am posting this video because I want to remind all of you about the two views. Now, there used to be three views, there's now down to two. But it's still a huge point of confusion and can really cause a lot of miscommunications between you, your team, you and the person you're teaching you and whoever else you're trying to collaborate with using ClickUp. So, yes, once again, disclaimer here. This is a temporary feature. I'm assuming they're testing out different interfaces. And just like the third view that used to be here, eventually there will only be one view. But as of what is it, May 2020 here, there are still two. So in this video, I'm going to answer five questions about these two different views, just to help you kind of navigate it and not make the mistakes that I was of trying to communicate with somebody who's looking at things the opposite way. So, number one, what are the differences? Number two, what is the default way that people who are new to ClickUp are looking at this? What view is default? Number three, how do you change your views? How do you get to this menu that I'm at right now? Number four, what? Why is this a thing? Kind of talked about that a little bit. And five, which should you choose, which style of layout is going to work better for you? And before we get started, let me just introduce myself. My name is Layla, and on this channel, two times a week, I release videos talking about how small teams can work smarter by using technology, refining their workflows, and making very clear processes. My focus is on the small team who wants to work smarter without all the bureaucracy. Because I really think consistency and bureaucracy are different things. And we can achieve consistency and without the bureaucracy. We want to stay small, but we want to work smart. And that's what I cover here on this channel. So if that sounds like something that you're interested in or you just want more tips about ClickUp, go ahead and hit that subscribe button below. This Video, wherever it is. All right, let's just dive into today. So we're going to do a side by side comparison here of these two views. On the left we'll have the clean view, and on the right we're going to have the modern view. And to begin comparing them, let's first dig into each, reviewing the modern view on the right first. So the modern view starts off with Favorites at the top. You can also have it pinned across the very top bar. Below that are all of your spaces. Spaces are the top of the hierarchy, below the actual workspace you're in. The space usually is used for something like client work or marketing. Depending on how your business is arranged, you might use spaces for your divisions or your offices or your sectors. Lots of different ways to organize ClickUp, but nonetheless, space spaces are the top. Beneath those are all the folders and inside all the folders are the list. You can see them all in one long row, almost like a table of contents. In that sidebar, search runs and searches through that entire list. And that's pretty much it for the main sidebar. When you go to the left one layer further, you see that there is home your tasks area, which shows you that sidebar that we just talked about. Notifications, your dashboards, and at the very bottom, docs, goals, help, etc. Now we're going to switch gears to the clean view here. You see, rather than having the top of the page start with favorites, instead it goes right into spaces. The label space is smaller because I guess they're assuming you know what these are at this point. And the actual top header, the biggest text is the actual name of the space. So in my case it's called the food space. Yours might mean marketing, yours might be client services. But the space name is showing up there and only the folders and lists in that section are showing up for me. So I am not seeing what's in this other list here. Instead I am only seeing the stuff that is in the food space Space. Food space space. On the far left sidebar we can see some additional details. So here we see there's the logo. Home notifications. Tasks is no longer there. Below that, Favorites is now a sidebar on the far left. And down here we've got everything view only as an icon and each space has its own icon on the left. When I flick between these, actually, let's go ahead and going to make this one bright here. When I flip between these you can see it actually changes what I'm seeing. To show me all of the contents of that space. But when I'm in one space I do not see the contents of another space. Again, more separation there. Back to the editor view here. We also have here on the left side we've got the dashboards now all the way at the bottom with all of our other miscellaneous things which have not changed. So that's the real difference. So the next question you're probably wondering is which view do my guests see by default? If someone doesn't change this, doesn't even know this setting is here, which view are they seeing? Seeing? So they are going to see the modern view by default which looks like this shows them all of the things in one long line. And yeah, that's what they'll see. So when you are making tutorials or instructions for someone who is a newbie, it's probably best to use this view at this point in time. I'm not sure if ClickUp internally is shifting one way or another. Maybe in the future the default will be different, but as of this point, again, May 2020, we're here. The default is the modern view, this view right here with dashboards at the top. The next question you might have is how do you change yours to be the other view should you decide to? So I'm actually kind of. I've given it away a few times here. So imagine you are in your Clip account. You can expand your sidebar or press Q to expand it. Then you're going to go down until you see the gear appear and you're going to go to layout size and style and you can switch it over to clean. Similarly, if you're in clean view and you want to switch back, you can click Q or click on that expansion. Once again, like we've got a little bit of a change in interface, but the sidebar setting is a little bit up higher and once again you can change it back. You can also change the spacing here, but that doesn't really do too much. The other question I'm sure you're asking is why is this a thing? ClickUp is already such a hard tool to use. Why are there two different interfaces that make it trippy for you to explain to others what you're seeing on your screen versus what they're seeing on their screen? The reason is, as far as I can tell, again, I don't work at ClickUp. I don't know for sure, but my guess is that they are testing out different interfaces. Previously, earlier on, I think even in this year they had three layouts here and they Were testing three different ones based on who was using what, how many people were, you know, enjoying a certain layout, they decided to remove the third option. My guess is that in a few years, few months, few weeks, who knows, in Clickups world we're going to see one of these, one of these options be eliminated in favor of one of the other ones. Again, not sure which one's going to come out the winner, but I would imagine eventually this confusion will be removed. It's not there yet, so just be prepared for it as it's here. So the final question is, which one should you use? Should you be using clean or modern? Here I am in the modern layout and I think modern layout is great for the new user who's still trying to find their way around. Because Tasks has that task icon, because dashboards are right up at the top where you can grab them easily. I think this is an easier layout for someone just starting out. I also think modern is a better layout for when you have less stuff, you have less spaces, you have less stuff in those spaces, as you can see here, because everything's all in one line. When I expand all of these, if I had a bunch of stuff in here, I could easily have a long scrolling sidebar because there's just so much content. But in this example I don't have that much. And so having all of these things on one sidebar, I still am never maxing out the sidebar. So in this case with a shorter list and being a newer user, I I would go with Modern view. However, if you are maybe a more sophisticated user, maybe you like the layout of Slack and you want something reminiscent of that, or maybe you just have a lot in each space and you want them to be very separate feeling, then it might make sense to go to the clean view. What's nice about this is that when we expand all of our sections here, we still have plenty of space to keep going because we don't have that extra list down here just hanging around with all of our different spaces. If we had 15 different spaces, you can imagine that would eat up a lot of real estate on this sidebar. So again, if you have more, clean is probably better. If you're more familiar with the tool, clean is probably better. Things like everything, it's really nice. In the other view to be able to have the word everything there here you need to know that these four circles mean everything and a new user isn't necessarily going to know that. So in review, if you have less complexity, less spaces, less folders, less lists less of everything, including less familiarity with ClickUp. I would stick with the modern layout if you are someone who likes to have things more minimal. If you're familiar with ClickUp, if you feel comfortable, if you like the layout of Slack, if you want just a emptier sidebar so it feels more clean. Go figure. Go with the clean layout. As of this point they are both there. You know, now I'm sitting here and thinking about it. I want the clean view to become a thing. And if they're only going to pick one view, which I don't know if they are, but I'm guessing they are, I want it to be the clean view. So never mind. Disregard everything I said. Everyone go on right now and switch to the Clean view to put your little digital vote in for that one so that one makes the cut. Because that's the one I like most. If you found this tutorial helpful, do me a favor and leave a comment below. It not only helps me feel like this work is valuable, it also helps the YouTube algorithm tell other people that this YouTube content is valuable and attracts more people to this channel, which I would really, really appreciate. If you have any ideas for future episodes, whether they're about ClickUp, task management, project management for small teams, workflows, you name it, leave it in the comment. I would love to have some ideas for the next video I'm going to be coming out. And again, click subscribe if you haven't already. Two times a week you'll see videos like this come out on the channel and by subscribing you can make sure you don't miss them. So that's it for this one. My name is Layla and once again, thank you so much for watching and joining me for this tutorial. I'll see you in the next video.